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How We Learn Fairness

By Maria Konnikova

A pair of brown capuchin monkeys are sitting in a cage. From time to time, their caretakers give them tokens, which they can then exchange for food. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers. So what happens when unfairness strikes—when, in exchange for identical tokens, one monkey gets a cucumber and the other a grape?

When Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal carried out just this experiment, in 2003, focussing on female capuchin monkeys, they found that monkeys hate being disadvantaged. A monkey in isolation is happy to eat either a grape or a slice of cucumber. But a monkey who sees that she’s received a cucumber while her partner has gotten a grape reacts with anger: she might hurl her cucumber from her cage. Some primates, Brosnan and de Waal concluded, “dislike inequity.” They hate getting the short end of the stick. Psychologists have a technical term for this reaction: they call it “disadvantageous-inequity aversion.” This instinctual aversion to getting less than others has been found in chimpanzees and dogs , and it occurs, of course, in people, in whom it seems to develop from a young age. The psychologists Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian have found , for example, that babies as young as twelve months prefer fair-minded cartoon animals to unfair ones.

And yet, for humans, an aversion to getting less is just one aspect of unfairness. Unlike other animals, we sometimes balk at receiving more than other people. Technically speaking, we experience “advantageous-inequity aversion.” In some situations, we’ll even give up something good because it’s more than someone else is getting. In those moments, we seek to insure that the distribution of goods remains fair. We don’t want the long end of the stick, either.

It seems likely that our aversion to being disadvantaged is innate, because we share it with other animals. The question for psychologists is whether our aversion to benefitting from inequality is innate, too—or, alternatively, if it’s learned through some form of socialization. In December, the psychologists Peter Blake, Katherine McAuliffe, Felix Warneken, and their colleagues published the results of experiments designed to answer this question. Their research spanned seven nations—India, Uganda, Peru, Senegal, Mexico, Canada, and the United States—and looked at close to nine hundred children, aged four to fifteen. They examined whether advantageous-inequity aversion—A.I., as they call it—emerges in all cultures, and, if it does, whether it emerges in the same way everywhere.

Their method was relatively simple. They sat two children down at a table, each in front of an empty bowl. Above each bowl was a tray, onto which the experimenter placed candy. Often, she distributed candy unfairly: she might place four candies on one tray and only one on the other. The child being tested then faced a choice. She could pull a green handle to accept the presented candies, causing them to fall into their respective bowls—or she could pull a red handle to reject them, causing all the candies to fall into a third, off-limits bowl, in the center.

The researchers found that, all over the world, children tended to reject the candies when the split favored the other child. (That is, they rejected disadvantageous inequity, or D.I.) They also found that some, older kids would reject advantageous offers. None of that is surprising. A.I. has been documented among adults many times in the past; in one early study , from behavioral economist George Loewenstein and his colleagues, as many as sixty-six per cent of participants disliked getting more than someone else. The surprising part is that the kids only displayed A.I. in three countries: Canada, the United States, and Uganda. In the other countries—Mexico, India, Senegal, and Peru—they enjoyed the sweet taste of inequality.

These results raise some fascinating questions. Why were kids from only certain countries bothered by having an unfair advantage? And were they rejecting those unfair offers because they cared about fairness—or for some other, less obvious reason?

It’s helpful to start by stepping back from the more complicated case of A.I. to the simpler case of D.I. There are lots of reasons to object to disadvantageous inequity, and some are more obvious than others. D.I. is bad substantively, of course, because you get less candy. But it’s also bad socially, because it signals a demotion in status. In fact, when kids reject disadvantageous offers, they’re often most concerned about their social status, rather than with the candy itself, or with abstract ideas like equality. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s all about me : how do I come off in this scenario?

The importance of social hierarchy in the rejection of disadvantageous unfairness has been cleverly demonstrated in several experiments. In one study , the psychologists Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom, and Karen Wynn had kids choose between getting one token and giving one to another child, or getting two tokens and giving three to the other kid. “You might think that the latter is the better choice because both children get more,” Bloom writes, in his book “Just Babies.” Often, though, the children chose the first option—just one token each—insuring that they wouldn’t get less than someone else.

In another version of the study, Bloom and his colleagues offered a choice between two tokens all around, or one for the subject and none for her counterpart. Five- and six-year-olds preferred the second option: that is, they gave up a reward in exchange for having more than their peers. “We have a natural aversion to getting less—not to inequity,” Bloom told me. The kids’ behavior isn’t principled; on the contrary, Bloom believes, it seems motivated by something very much like spite. And the message is clear: I want to emerge on top. The absolute number of candies matters less than my relative status.

If D.I. is really about status rather than fairness, could A.I. be about status, too? Rejecting an advantageous offer, after all, also sends a social signal. If you live in a society where ideas of fairness and equality hold a privileged position, then it becomes meaningful to show yourself as embracing those ideals, even at personal cost. Those around you might feel that, since you’re the type of person who believes in equity no matter what, you’re valuable to society, and worthy of respect. From this perspective, both D.I. and A.I. achieve the same end: making sure you maintain status. Perhaps, for older kids who are transitioning into adolescence, status doesn’t always come from having more. It could also flow from being an admirable role model.

If status really is the driving force behind both D.I. and A.I., it would explain one of the study’s relative outliers: Mexico. When the experiment was run there, very few of the children exhibited A.I.; moreover, D.I. appeared to develop far later than in other societies. The Mexican children, in other words, tended to accept all offers, however unequal in any direction. The authors point out that, in that particular sample, most of the kids already knew each other. Perhaps they had already developed reputations, and, as a result, what happened in the experiment had no real implications for their social hierarchy. They were free to enjoy the candy all by itself, without social signals on the side.

Still, even if A.I. and D.I. have a lot in common—even if they’re both about status—the research from Blake and his colleagues suggests that they are different in at least one fundamental way. D.I. is innate: all over the world, and in the animal kingdom, getting less than others is perceived as an insult. A.I., on the other hand, seems to be a product of social life or culture. Globally, at least among children, it appears to be very unevenly distributed. In Canada, the United States, and Uganda, the study shows that older kids are more likely, on average, to reject an advantageous offer than an equal offer. By contrast, in Mexico, Peru, India, and Senegal, they willingly accept getting more. In the past, studies of A.I. have focussed on so-called WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. As a result, the uneven distribution of A.I. went beneath the radar.

To explain its uneven distribution, Blake and his colleagues point to a number of potential causes. The most prominent is “Western norms.” They suggest that advantageous-equity aversion is more prevalent in Western societies because, in the West, equality and the abstract notion of “fairness” are valued as goods in their own right; it’s only within that framework that sacrificing your self-interest in the name of fairness comes to be linked with status. (In recent years, of course, Western societies have been wrestling with the problem of rising inequality—an irony on which the researchers choose not to dwell.) In an earlier study , McAuliffe, Blake, Warneken, and their colleagues found that, while subjects exhibited D.I. even in the absence of a visible partner, A.I. only emerged in social situations. This suggests that A.I. might require certain kinds of social environments to thrive.

If it’s Western culture that encourages A.I., then why is it so common in Uganda? Blake and his colleagues posit that the answer lies in the specific subset of the Ugandan population they surveyed. They recruited children from schools that had Western teachers, and in which students were frequently exposed to Western researchers. Perhaps, they write, that environment had changed the students’ sense of fairness. This reasoning seems a bit thin: aren’t other societies also exposed to Western norms, especially in the modern age of ubiquitous smartphones and mass media? “It remains possible that children in Uganda reject an advantage for other reasons not linked to Western norms,” the authors write. “If this is the case, we would expect to see A.I. emerge in children in other communities in Uganda with similar cultural norms but different institutional structures.”

Behind the question of how “Western” A.I. is, a broader question looms. What factors in society could create a norm whereby it’s valuable to establish yourself publicly as someone who doesn’t want to receive more than others? In the same set of studies in which he found that, under some circumstances, up to sixty-six per cent of adults experienced A.I., George Loewenstein tried to tease out what conditions might give rise to advantageous-inequality aversion in the first place. He started by asking subjects to imagine themselves in a specific business scenario. In the first scenario, they had invented a new type of ski with someone; in another, they were splitting tax revenue from a vacant lot with a neighbor; and, in a third, they were in conflict with a sales manager at a retail outlet. In each of these scenarios, their preëxisting relationship with their counterpart was described as positive, negative, or neutral, and the financial payments were either equal or representative of disadvantageous or advantageous inequity. As expected, when it came to D.I., pretty much no one enjoyed receiving less than the co-inventor, business partner, or manager. A.I., by contrast, was unevenly distributed; in some situations, it was absent altogether. It emerged readily in the invention and vacant-lot scenarios— if the preëxisting relationship was positive or neutral; it was relatively infrequent in the retail scenario; and, if the relationship was negative, it disappeared across the board. (In that case, people preferred to come out ahead of their counterparts.)

Based on his participants’ choices, Loewenstein divided them into three groups: saints, loyalists, and ruthless competitors. Saints preferred equality over everything else; they were concerned with fairness for its own sake. Loyalists preferred equality in positive relationships, but, in negative ones, they sought A.I.—they approached the relationship socially, seeking to create loyalty by giving up their unfair advantages. Ruthless competitors always preferred getting more. The relative percentages of the saints, loyalists, and ruthless competitors were twenty-four, twenty-seven, and thirty-six, respectively. (Eighteen per cent couldn’t be classified.) Then, in a follow-up, Loewenstein clarified the preëxisting relationships, providing his subjects with several paragraphs of explanation as to why those relationships were positive, negative, or neutral. Under that condition, the number of saints and ruthless competitors fell, while the proportion of loyalists rose to over half—fifty-two per cent.

When participants received more context for the study’s social scenarios and became more invested in their relationships, in other words, they gave up more to nourish and maintain them. And they are wise to do so. The results of another set of experiments show that the more someone earns in a context of inequality, the more hostile reactions from others she provokes. People dislike those at the top of the heap more when the heap itself is taller.

All of these findings have something to say about why we value fairness. Our ideas about fairness are relativistic, rather than absolute. In many ways, we approach fairness as a form of social signalling. People tend not to care about equality as an abstract principle; instead, they use fairness to negotiate their place in a social hierarchy. And, for that reason, we’re especially willing to give up our unfair advantages when there’s the possibility of strengthening a future relationship.

Could these general principles explain why A.I. appears earlier or more often in some societies? Possibly, but there’s a lot more research to do before anything like a clear-cut answer emerges. One thing we do know is that culture plays a role—but what kind of culture? Can it be taught? Maybe, if we can figure out the answer to that question, we’ll be able to build a world where there are more saints and loyalists—and fewer ruthless competitors.

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Fair or unfair? Even Capuchin monkeys recognize unequal pay

You do your job, you get paid. Life is good, right?

Unless you're a monkey -- and you see your buddy is getting a better reward than you for doing the exact same task. 

Frans de Waal, a primatologist and Emory University professor, conducted an experiment on Capuchin monkeys about 10 years ago, which he dubbed the “Fairness Study.” During the study, two monkeys were each asked to perform a task for a reward. If you’re a monkey, a chunk of cucumber is an acceptable reward, but you know you’re really keeping up with the Joneses when you get rewarded with grapes.

In the viral video, uploaded to YouTube in May, the first time a monkey completes the required task (which involved handing a lab worker a small rock), he is paid with a small chunk of cucumber. But then the monkey discovers his buddy is rewarded with a grape -- valuable currency in the monkey world -- for doing the exact same job. Well, that wasn’t going to fly. What was going to fly were chunks of cucumber as the first monkey, now green with envy, pounds the table in protest and rattles the walls of his cage.

"So, this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here," says de Waal, referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

De Waal as his colleague, Sarah Brosnan, published their findings in the journal Nature in 2003. The video from May has gone viral, with more than 1.2 million views. 

Joy Jernigan contributed to this report. Dana Macario is a Seattle-area writer who, like the Capuchin monkeys, has been known to have a case of the wants now and then.

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Monkeys for equal pay (and every cat for itself)

In a campus appearance hosted by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, primatologist Frans de Waal discussed his research on "the emotional side of animal behavior" — behavior, he insists, more like our own than some humans admit.

By Barry Bergman

March 11, 2015

A philosopher once wrote to Frans de Waal, explaining the flaw in the primatologist’s findings on what he calls “the emotional side of animal behavior.”

It was impossible that monkeys have a sense of fairness, the philosopher said, “because the sense of fairness was discovered during the French Revolution.”

Frans de Waal: Like humans, along with aggression, chimps’ behavior includes reconciliation, empathy and consolation. (UC Berkeley photos by Barry Bergman)

On Monday, in a lively campus appearance hosted by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, de Waal offered compelling evidence that capuchin monkeys — namesakes, though presumably not co-religionists, of an order of Catholic friars — not only recognize inequity, but are quick to challenge it.

Before a packed house at Sibley Auditorium, de Waal played a video of an experiment he’d done with pairs of capuchin monkeys, housed side by side in glass cages. In return for handing a pebble to a researcher, one monkey receives a bland piece of cucumber, which she’s happy to get — until she sees that her partner’s reward for the very same task is a tasty grape.

She gives it another try, but instead of a grape gets cucumber again. This time she hurls the cuke back at the researcher, rattles her cage, pounds the floor in angry protest. It’s a tantrum similar, in fact — as another video showed — to that of a human toddler who sees her older brother get a cookie, only to get half herself.

During de Waal’s experiments, he said, monkeys rewarded equitably rejected the cucumber just 5 percent of the time. If their partners received a grape, however, they refused their lower pay at a rate of 50 percent. And when partners were given a grape “for free,” without even having to pick up a pebble, rejections soared.

Such behavior, said the Dutch-born de Waal, now at Emory University, is further evidence that humans are not the only species to boast a moral code, and that morality is separate from God and religion. Instead, it’s related to what he calls the “prosocial tendencies” of primates and other animals, a self-awareness — and awareness of others — that gives rise to emotional responses like reconciliation, empathy and consolation.

“I’ve seen chimps kill each other,” said de Waal, “so I’m very fully aware of their competitive side.” After studying aggression in chimps as a student in the Netherlands, though, “It struck me that after fights they would come together, they kissed and embraced each other, and that was actually more interesting than the aggression itself.”

De Waal on the notion that humans are special: “I don’t believe a word of it.”

And chimps aren’t the only nonhuman animals with a bent for reconciliation. “There’s only one mammal that has been tested where it has not been found, and that’s a mammal many of you have at home,” de Waal said. “It’s a domestic cat.

“I’m a big cat lover,” he added, “and I’m still waiting for the magical moment.”

The feline, he explained, is a “solitary hunter,” and so has less need to work in tandem with partners, as primates and elephants have proved able to do in his and others’ experiments. But he rejects the distinction many people make between humans and other species, “that what animals do must be instinctive, and what we do is cultural.”

He described the difference between two kinds of macaques, rhesus monkeys and stump-tails, and the cultural influence one can have on the other. Rhesus monkeys, he said, are “very hierarchical,” prone to punishing subordinates and not keen on reconciliation. Stump-tailed monkeys, by contrast, are “very tolerant and engaging.”

“I usually compare them as the New Yorkers and the Californians,” he said.

In one experiment, juvenile stump-tailed and rhesus monkeys were housed together for five months — during which the stump-tails’ mellowness rubbed off on their more belligerent cousins.

“What we’re showing here is how strongly reconciliation behavior in rhesus monkeys can be affected by the social environment,” said de Waal. “Which means that humans, of course, can also be affected by the social environment.”

He cited studies that reveal “big cultural differences” between America and Japan, where children reconcile “much more” than their U.S. counterparts — likely due, according to researchers, to the way teachers in each country handle conflict in class and on the playground.

“Teachers in the U.S., as soon as there’s a fight among kids they step in and stop it,” he said, while in Japan “they let them fight, and reconcile on their own.”

‘The bonobo is an atheist’

During his hourlong talk, followed by questions from the audience, de Waal employed data, humor and videos to break down commonly held beliefs about the differences between human and nonhuman animals. There were chimps showing empathy by unselfishly caring for their partners’ well-being, for example, and a pair of elephants figuring out how to haul in a tricky feeding apparatus by coordinating their efforts.

And while his listeners were rapt throughout, they witnessed plenty of evidence of “yawn contagion,” which, like other manifestations of empathy — human and not — rises and falls in relation to others’ perceived “otherness.”

De Waal, a prolific author whose most recent book is The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, bristles at the notion that “humans are special,” a conceit, he said, prevalent in the literature of economics and anthropology: “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“The bonobo is an atheist, I think,” he said Monday. “Although maybe the bonobo would be diplomatic and say, ‘I am an agnostic.’

“I’m interested in the evolution of morality,” he explained. “And each time I talk about the evolution of morality people say, well, it comes from God, or it comes from religion. And I’m sort of tired of that. Because I think our current religions are just a couple of thousand years old, and I cannot imagine that 200,000 years ago our ancestors had no rules of right and wrong, or fairness, or whatever. So morality must be much older.”

At the least, he might have added, it predated the French Revolution.

Advertisement

Envious monkeys can spot a fair deal

By Roxanne Khamsi

13 November 2007

Monkeys invest less energy in a task if they see other monkeys receiving better rewards for the same effort, researchers report. They say that their experiment provides new evidence that non-human primates can feel envy. The findings could also help explain why humans have such a keen sense of fairness, according to experts.

Previous studies have found that monkeys put less effort into a task when they see cage-mates receiving tastier treats for completing the same task. But scientists have not felt confident in saying why the poorly rewarded animals slack off.

Some people have suggested the primates that refuse to repeat the task are simply greedy and therefore only willing to work for a bigger reward. Alternately, it has been proposed that the monkeys stop performing the task because they have received large rewards in the past and feel frustrated by the measly amounts offered in later trials.

To understand the monkeys’ reluctance to participate in the task, Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, US, and colleagues decided to try several variations on this experiment.

Fruits of labour

They trained 13 capuchin monkeys ( Cebus apella ) to retrieve a small rock and place it in the experimenter’s hands. In exchange for completing this task, the animals received a reward.

Pairs of monkeys were seated beside one another in a test booth, separated by a mesh partition. In one trial, the monkeys received the same sized cucumber reward for their efforts and 90% completed the task within 5 seconds.

But then the researchers gave one of the monkeys a grape instead of a cucumber. To a human this may seem like a minor detail, but monkeys go bananas over grapes, which they far prefer to cucumbers.

When the monkeys given cucumber saw their partners receive this grape reward, they invested less effort in future repetitions of the task, and completed it within 5 seconds only 80% of the time.

In a third scenario, the monkeys both received the same cucumber reward, but could see a bowl of grapes just beyond their reach. Under these circumstances, the animals performed the task with the same willingness as when the grapes were hidden. The researchers say that this rules out the possibility that the primates alter their behaviour out of greed.

Species variation

De Waal’s team also found that the monkeys exhibited the same patterns of behaviour regardless of whether they had received a grape or cucumber in preceding experiments, discounting the possibility that the animals slacked off out of frustration from unmet expectations.

They say the study “confirms that capuchin monkeys react negatively to situations in which they receive a less favourable reward than their partner for the same task. Our control procedures suggest that this response was due solely to the discrepancy between the monkey’s own and the other’s rewards and not to individual factors such as greed or frustration.”

Other experts, however, note that earlier studies have shown that monkeys and chimps do not always care about fairness. Keith Jensen at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, recently demonstrated that chimpanzees will accept a rotten deal from a fellow chimp.

Jensen says that understanding how non-human primates view fairness can provide clues about how humans evolved a great capacity for cooperation. But he adds: “Human cooperation is special”.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707182104)

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• Brief Communication
• Published: 11 March 2004

Animal behaviour

Fair refusal by capuchin monkeys

• Clive D. L. Wynne 1  

Nature volume  428 ,  page 140 ( 2004 ) Cite this article

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Brosnan and de Waal 1 report that capuchin monkeys show evidence of a sense of fairness or ‘inequity aversion’ because they rejected a less preferred reward when they saw a partner monkey receive a preferred reward for the same task. However, this does not show that monkeys are averse to inequity, only that they reject a lesser reward when better rewards are available. There are risks inherent in seeking anthropomorphic explanations for non-human behaviour.

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In the ‘inequality test’, the monkeys refused to exchange a token for a cucumber slice (non-preferred reward) on 43% of trials when they saw a partner monkey receive a preferred grape reward for the same effort. However, in the ‘food control’ condition, in which the partner was not present, these same monkeys were just as likely to refuse the cucumber slice when they saw a grape placed where the partner normally sat (49% refusals). There can be nothing inequitous about receiving a non-preferred reward if nobody is receiving anything better. In the food-control condition, the monkeys are refusing the non-preferred reward simply because they can see that a better reward is potentially available. This is therefore the most parsimonious explanation for their refusal to accept the non-preferred reward when they see another monkey receive a better one.

Brosnan and de Waal 1 reject this reward-availability explanation for two reasons. First, in a third condition (the ‘effort control’ condition), where monkeys saw their partner receive a grape without having to exchange a token, the monkeys were more likely to refuse the cucumber slice than in the food-control condition. On its own, the comparison of the effort-control and food-control conditions is in the direction required by a fairness account. But fairness cannot account for the equally large difference between the effort-control and inequality-test conditions.

The basis of Brosnan and de Waal's second reason for rejecting the reward-availability explanation is in their Fig. 2, which seems to show an increasing trend of non-exchange for the two conditions in which another monkey was present (inequality test and effort control) and a decreasing trend of rejections in the food-control condition where no other monkey was present. Their Fig. 2 shows mean rejections for the first 10 and last 15 trials (not, as stated in the paper, the first 15 and last 10 trials; Brosnan and de Waal, personal communication) averaged across two sessions.

When the cumulative rate of rejections is represented across all trials of both sessions for Brosnan and de Waal's monkeys, we find that there is no overall increase in rejection rate in the inequality-test and effort-control conditions, and that the rate does not decline across sessions in the food-control condition (results not shown).

Although explanations of animal behaviour in anthropomorphic terms are notoriously prone to imprecision 2 , if ‘fairness’ or ‘inequity aversion’ mean anything in this context, they surely imply that individuals reject rewards more often when they see another receive a better reward than when the better reward is simply in view with no one else there to consume it. The very similar levels and patterns of cucumber rejection in the inequality-test and food-control conditions therefore contradict an account based on fairness or inequality.

Brosnan, S. F. & de Waal, F. B. M. Nature 425 , 297–299 (2003).

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Wynne, C. D. L. Do Animals Think? (Princeton Univ. Press, in the press).

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Why Do You Care About Fairness? Ask A Chimp

Alison Bruzek

What do you mean you got a grape? I only got a carrot! iStockphoto hide caption

What do you mean you got a grape? I only got a carrot!

Anyone who has spent time with a child knows the all too familiar refrain: "That's not fair!" But it's not just humans who recognize when they're not getting an equitable share of pie (or toys, or time with Mom and Dad, as the case may be). Some animals, including monkeys, fish and dogs, can also detect inequity.

What we haven't known is whether animals notice when they get favored treatment and will reject a treat to keep things equal. Primate researchers Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University and Frans de Waal of Emory University say yes — but only some species will.

"The response to getting less than a partner ... is widespread throughout the animal kingdom in species that cooperate," Brosnan tells Shots. "Cooperative species" include primates, some species of fish, and wolf packs, among many others. But the second half of fairness, she adds, is noticing when you get more, and doing something about it to maintain that social relationship.

"This second aspect is something special," Brosnan says. Getting less of something in the short run, in exchange for a social gain — like having a happy partner by your side — is unusual. In fact, only humans and their closest ape cousins seem to do it.

The findings are part of Brosnan and de Waal's broader review of inequity among nonhuman primates and other animals, published Thursday in Science . One study they cite found that when two capuchin monkeys worked together to achieve rewards, if one received a grape and the other a cucumber (less yummy, I'd have to agree), the monkey with the cucumber would toss it away , in apparent anger.

On the flip side, when two unrelated chimps put side by side were presented with a tasty grape and a less tasty carrot, the chimp with the grape sometimes threw it away. "I would say that the most likely cause was either fear of retribution or just general discomfort about being around an individual getting less than you," says Brosnan. Differences in the social hierarchy also played a role, she says. Dominant chimps were angrier when they were on the receiving end of a lesser reward than those lower in the pecking order.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Feeling down watching this will help.

The results among the chimps are indicative of highly cooperative societies, where relying on someone else is especially crucial. This may be why chimpanzees and humans will avoid inequity, Brosnan suggests, to have long-term cooperation from friends.

However, she cautions against calling it fairness exactly: "Fairness is a social ideal" she says. ... [The animals] don't have social ideals in the same sense [that people do]." Her research reveals behaviors that may look like a push for fairness; but that doesn't mean strategic, higher-order thinking is driving it. The explanation may be much simpler, based more on emotion, Brosnan says: "When my social partner gets upset, I give them something that makes them happy."

If you, too, are the type of person who demands your fair share in life, this may be evolutionarily advantageous. "If that's the kind of person you are, then there's some evidence that you do better in the world," Robert Frank , economist at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, tells Shots. "People aren't going to strike one-sided bargains with you; they'll know not to mess with you."

So complain on, complainers. Your strict sense of fairness may be doing you good.

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What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness

By Nicholas Kristof

• June 3, 2017

Monkeys were taught in an experiment to hand over pebbles in exchange for cucumber slices. They were happy with this deal.

Then the researcher randomly offered one monkey — in sight of a second — an even better deal: a grape for a pebble. Monkeys love grapes, so this fellow was thrilled.

The researcher then returned to the second monkey, but presented just a cucumber for the pebble. Now, this offer was insulting. In some cases the monkey would throw the cucumber back at the primatologist in disgust.

In other words, the monkeys cared deeply about fairness. What mattered to them was not just what they received but also what others got.

Monkeys aren’t the only primates instinctively offended by inequality. For example, two scholars examined data from millions of flights to identify what factors resulted in “air rage” incidents. One huge factor: a first-class cabin.

An incident in a coach section was four times as likely if the plane also had a first-class cabin; a first-class section increased the risk of a disturbance as much as a nine-hour delay did.

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Why monkeys (and humans) are wired for fairness

• decision-making

Number of debt-laden ‘zombie’ companies soars to nearly 7,000—and many of these publicly traded firms won’t survive: ‘They’re going to get crushed’

They are called zombies, companies so laden with debt that they are just stumbling by on the brink of survival, barely able to pay even the interest on their loans and often just a bad business hit away from dying off for good.

An Associated Press analysis found their numbers have soared to nearly 7,000 publicly traded companies around the world — 2,000 in the United States alone — whiplashed by years of piling up cheap debt followed by stubborn inflation that has pushed borrowing costs to  decade highs .

And now many of these mostly small and mid-sized walking wounded could soon be facing their day of reckoning, with due dates looming on hundreds of billions of dollars of loans they may not be able to pay back.

“They’re going to get crushed,” Valens Securities Managing Director Robert Spivey said of the weakest zombies.

Added Miami investor Mark Spitznagel, who famously bet against stocks before the last two crashes: “The clock is ticking.”

Zombies are commonly defined as companies that have failed to make enough money from operations in the past three years to pay even the interest on their loans. AP’s analysis found their ranks in raw numbers have jumped over the past decade by a third or more in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the U.S., including companies that run Carnival Cruise Line, JetBlue Airways , Wayfair , Peloton, Italy’s Telecom Italia and British soccer giant Manchester United.

To be sure, the number of companies, in general, has increased over the past decade, making comparisons difficult, but even limiting the analysis to companies that existed a decade ago, zombies have jumped nearly 30%.

They include utilities, food producers, tech companies, owners of hospitals and nursing home chains whose weak finances hobbled their responses in the pandemic, and real estate firms struggling with half-empty office buildings in the heart of major cities.

As the number of zombies has grown, so too has the potential damage if they are forced to file for bankruptcy or close their doors permanently. Companies in the AP’s analysis employ at least 130 million people in a dozen countries.

Already, the number of U.S. companies going bankrupt has hit a 14-year high, a surge expected in a recession, not an expansion. Corporate bankruptcies have also recently hit highs of nearly a decade or more in Canada, the U.K., France and Spain.

Some experts say zombies may be able to avoid layoffs, selloffs of business units or collapse if central banks cut interest rates, which the  European Central Bank  began doing this week, though scattered defaults and bankruptcies could still drag on the economy. Others think the pandemic inflated the ranks of zombies and the impact is temporary.

“Revenue went down, or didn’t grow as much as projected, but that doesn’t mean they are all about to go bust,” said Martin Fridson, CEO of research firm FridsonVision High Yield Strategy.

For its part, Wall Street isn’t panicking. Investors have been buying stock of some zombies and their “junk bonds,” loans rating agencies deem most at risk of default. While that may help zombies raise cash in the short term, investors pouring money into these securities and pushing up their prices could eventually face heavy losses.

“We have people gambling in the public markets at an unprecedented level,” said David Trainer, head of New Constructs, an investment research group that tracks the cash drain on zombies. “They don’t see risk.”

WARNING SIGNS

Credit rating agencies and economists  warned about  the  dangers of companies piling on debt  for years as interest rates fell but got a big push when central banks around the world cut benchmark rates to near zero in the 2009 financial crisis and then again in the 2020-21 pandemic.

It was a giant, unprecedented experiment designed to spark a borrowing binge that would help avert a worldwide depression. It also created what some economists saw as a credit bubble that spread far beyond zombies, with low rates that also enticed heavy borrowing by governments, consumers and bigger, healthier companies.

The difference for many zombies is they lack deep cash reserves, and the interest they pay on many of their loans is variable, not fixed, so higher rates are hurting them right now. Most dangerously, zombie debt was often not used to expand, hire or invest in technology, but on buying back their own stock.

These so-called repurchases allow companies to “retire” shares, or take them off the market, a way to make up for new shares often created to boost the pay and retention packages for CEOs and other top executives.

But too many stock buybacks can drain cash from a business, which is what happened at Bed Bath & Beyond . The retail chain that once operated 1,500 stores struggled for years with a troubled transition to digital sales and other problems, but its heavy borrowing and decision to spend $7 billion in a decade on buybacks played a key role in its downfall.

Those buybacks came amid big paydays for top management, which Bed Bath & Beyond said in regulatory filings were intended to align with financial performance. Pay for just three top executives topped $140 million, according to executive data firm Equilar, even as its stock sunk from $80 to zero. Tens of thousands of workers in all 50 states lost their jobs as the chain spiraled to its  bankruptcy  filing last year.

Companies had a chance to cut their debt after then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul slashed corporate rates and allowed repatriation of profits overseas. But  most of the windfall  was spent on  buybacks  instead. Over the next two years, U.S. companies spent a record $1.3 trillion repurchasing and retiring their own stock, a 50% jump from the prior two years.

SmileDirectClub went from spending a little over $1 million a year on buying its own stock before the tax cut to spending $780 million as it boosted pay packages of top executives. One former CEO got $20 million in just four years. Stock in the heavily indebted teeth-straightening company plunged before it  went out of business  last year and put 2,700 people out of work.

“I was like, ‘How did this ever happen?’” said George Pettigrew, who held a tech job at the company’s Nashville, Tennessee, headquarters. ”I was shocked at the amount of the debt.”

Another zombie, JetBlue, suffered problems felt by many airlines, including the lingering impact of lost business during the pandemic. But it also was hurt by the decision to double its debt in the past decade and purchase hundreds of millions of dollars of its own stock. As interest costs soared and profits evaporated, that stock has dropped by two-thirds, and JetBlue has not made enough in pre-tax earnings to pay $717 million in interest over four straight years.

JetBlue said the AP’s way of screening for zombies isn’t fair to airlines because big purchases of aircraft “are an intrinsic part of the business model” that cut into profits and don’t reflect a company’s true health. It added that it’s been shoring up its finances recently by  cutting costs  and putting off purchases of new planes. JetBlue also hasn’t done a major stock buyback in more than three years.

In some cases, borrowed cash has gone straight into the pockets of controlling shareholders and wealthy family owners.

In Britain, the Glazer family that owns much of the Premier League’s  Manchester United  soccer franchise loaded up the company with debt in 2005, then got the team to borrow hundreds of millions a few years later. At the same time, the family had the team pay dividends to shareholders, including $165 million to the Glazers themselves, while its stadium, the Old Trafford, fell into disrepair.

“They’ve papered over the cracks but we’ve been in decline for more than a decade,” fan lobbying group head Chris Rumfitt said after a recent downpour sent water cascading from the upper stands in what spectators dubbed “Trafford Falls.” “There have been zero investments in infrastructure.”

The Glazers, who separately own the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, recently brought in a  new part owner  at Manchester United who has promised to inject $300 million into the business. The stock is falling anyway, down 20% so far this year to $16.25, no higher than it was a decade ago.

Manchester United declined to comment.

Zombie collapses wouldn’t be so scary if robust spending by governments, consumers and larger, more stable companies could act as a cushion. But they also piled up debt.

The U.S. government is expected spend $870 billion this year on interest on its  debt  alone, up a third in a year and more than it spends on defense. In South Korea, consumers are tapped out as credit card and other household debt hit fresh records. In the U.K., homeowners are missing payments on their mortgages at a rate not seen in years.

A real concern among investors is that too many zombies could collapse at the same time because central banks kept them on life support with low interest rates for years instead of allowing failures to sprinkle out over time, similar to the way allowing small forest fires to burn dry brush helps prevent an inferno.

“They’ve created a tinderbox,” said Spitznagel, founder of Universa Investments. “Any wildfire now threatens the entire ecosystem.”

TIME RUNNING OUT?

For the first few months of this year, hundreds of zombies refinanced their loans as lenders opened their wallets in anticipation that the Federal Reserve would start cutting in March. That new money helped stocks of more than 1,000 zombies in AP’s analysis rise 20% or more in the past six months across the dozen countries.

But many did not or could not refinance, and time is running out.

Through the summer and into September, when many investors now expect the first and only  Fed cut  this year, zombies will have to pay off $1.1 trillion of loans, according to AP’s analysis, two-thirds of the total due by the end of the year.

For its calculations, the AP used pre-tax, pre-interest earnings of publicly-traded companies from the database FactSet for both years it studied, 2023 and 2013. The countries selected were the biggest by gross domestic product: the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, the U.K., France, Canada, South Korea, Spain, Italy and Australia.

The study did not take into account cash in the bank that a company could use to pay its bills or assets it could sell to raise money. The results would also vary if other years were used due to economic conditions and interest rate policies. Still, studies by both the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, an organization for central banks in Switzerland, generally support AP’s findings that zombies have risen sharply.

Most of the publicly traded companies in the countries studied — 80% of 34,000 total — are not zombies. These healthier companies tend to be bigger with more cash, and many have reinvested it in higher-yielding bonds and other assets to make up for the higher interest payments now. Many also took advantage of pandemic-era low rates to refinance, pushing out repayment due dates into the future.

But the debt hasn’t gone away, and could become a problem for these companies as well if rates don’t fall over the next few years. In 2026, $586 billion in debt is coming due for the companies in the S&P 1500.

“They aren’t on anyone’s radar yet, but they are a hurricane. They could be a Category 4 or Category 5 if interest rates don’t go down,” Valens Securities’ Spivey said. “They’re going to lay people off. They’re going to have to cut costs.”

Some zombies aren’t waiting.

Telecom Italia struck a deal last year to  sell its landline network  but debt fears continue to push down its stock, so it has moved to put its subsea telecom unit and cell tower business up for sale, too.

Radio giant iHeartMedia , after  exiting bankruptcy  five years ago with less debt, is still struggling to pay what it owes by unloading real estate and radio towers. Its stock has fallen from $16.50 to $1.10 in five years.

Exercise company Peloton Interactive has  laid off hundreds of workers  to help pay debt that has more than quadrupled to $2.3 billion in just five years even though its pretax earnings before the new borrowing weren’t enough to pay interest. Stock that had soared to more than $170 a share during the pandemic recently closed at $3.74.

“If rates stay at this level in the near future, we’re going to see more bankruptcies,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “At some point the money comes due and they’re not going to have it. It’s game over.”

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